Do you remember the Russian artist and political activist Pyotr Pavlensky? Well, you should… we did an article about him in November/December after he sat down naked in Red Square and nailed his scrotum to the ground. Well he’s at it again, this time slicing off his earlobe whilst sitting naked on the roof of a psychiatric hospital.

Pavlensky is being held at the Serbsky psychiatric centre and was making a protest about Russia’s alleged use of psychiatric treatments on political dissidents. He and other dissidents claim that Russia is using old ‘Soviet-era tactics,’ eluding to when the same psychiatric centre was famous for giving questionable diagnoses to political dissidents who were being held there.

Mr. Pavlensky made a statement, using his wife’s Facebook page saying that slicing off his earlobe was intended to symbolize the destruction that’s caused by the authorities “returning to the use of psychiatry for political goals.”

Several human rights groups have also condemned the Russian authorities using psychiatric treatments against dissidents, the criticism came to a head when Amnesty International protested strongly against the sentencing of activist Mikhail Kosenko to ‘indefinite compulsory psychiatric treatment.’

As for Mr. Pavlensky… well, some would question his mental health, especially after the earlobe and scrotum incident. Add to that his previous, painful protests of sewing his lips together and wrapping himself in barbed wire in front of a government building in St. Petersburg. However, the world and democracy needs such people, because without them surely we would never hear about blatant human rights abuses.

Quite clearly the man has gone through much pain and discomfort to get these abuses into the limelight, so now the question is, what is the world going to do about it? Probably and unfortunately, very little.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(news, world)